Gold to Silver Ratio

What is the gold to silver ratio today?

As of July 27, 2026, the gold to silver ratio stands at 69.3: gold at $4,100.79 per ounce divided by silver at $59.22 per ounce. Every figure in this section comes from a single server snapshot taken when the page was generated, so the headline number, the calculation, and the comparisons below cannot contradict one another. The interactive chart above then streams live updates on top of that baseline.

Context turns the number into information. The mean of the annual averages since 1971 is 60.5, the lowest annual average was 26.5 in 1971, and the highest was 89.6 in 1991. Today's reading is higher than 35 of the last 55 annual averages, which tells you at a glance whether the current level is ordinary or extreme. Over the past 52 weeks the ratio has traded between 46.3 and 90.8, so you can also judge where today sits within its own recent range.

Traders check the ratio daily for a simple reason: gold and silver respond to the same macro forces but with different intensity. Silver typically moves further in both directions, so the ratio falls in precious metals bull runs and rises in stress episodes. Reading it alongside the individual gold price and silver price charts shows which metal is doing the work.

What is a good gold to silver ratio?

There is no officially correct level, but two rules of thumb circulate widely among precious metals investors: readings above 80 are commonly described as silver being historically cheap relative to gold, and readings below 50 as gold being the relative bargain. Those thresholds are conventions rather than laws. They come from where the ratio has spent most of its time since the 1970s, not from any physical relationship between the two metals.

The annual averages in the table below put numbers on the intuition. The mean since 1971 is 60.5. Only four annual averages have come in below 30, all between 1971 and 1980, and only five have topped 85: 1991, 1992, 2019, 2020, and 2025. A reading near the mean says little on its own; the extremes are where the ratio has historically earned attention.

Two cautions apply before treating any threshold as a signal. First, the ratio can stay stretched for years: seven of the eight annual averages from 2018 through 2025 were above 80. Second, a favorable ratio does not prevent both metals from falling together in a broad selloff, as happened in the 2008 and 2020 crashes. The 80 and 50 markers are commonly cited rules of thumb for relative value, not financial advice.

What has the gold to silver ratio been historically?

Takeaway: across 55 years of LBMA annual averages the gold to silver ratio has centered near 60.5, drifting structurally higher from the 30s of the 1970s to the 80s of the 2020s.

Each row divides the LBMA annual average gold price by the LBMA annual average silver price, the same figures shown on our gold price history and silver price history pages. Annual averages smooth out intraday spikes, which is why the table's extremes are milder than the famous 1980 and 2020 records.

How do you trade the gold silver ratio?

Ratio traders try to grow their total ounces rather than their dollar balance. The classic implementation is metal switching: when the ratio is historically high, exchange some gold for silver; if the ratio later contracts, switch back and end up holding more gold ounces than you started with. The arithmetic is straightforward. At a ratio of 90, one ounce of gold converts into 90 ounces of silver. If the ratio then falls to 60, those same 90 ounces convert back into one and a half ounces of gold, a 50 percent increase in ounces without predicting either metal's dollar price.

The same view can be expressed without touching physical metal. Futures traders buy one leg and sell the other on COMEX, where recognized spread positions carry lower margin than two outright contracts. ETF investors overweight one metal against the other, and options allow defined-risk versions of the same idea.

Every implementation carries costs that eat into the arithmetic: dealer premiums and possible tax events on physical swaps, roll costs on futures, borrowing fees on short legs, and above all the risk that the ratio keeps widening for years before any reversion arrives. The worked example above is illustrative math, not a recommendation.

Why is the gold to silver ratio so high?

Whenever the ratio trades far above its long-run mean of 60.5, the explanation is usually some blend of three forces. First, fear: gold is what central banks and institutions reach for during stress, while well over half of silver demand is industrial, so a recession scare lifts the numerator and hits the denominator simultaneously. March 2020 was the extreme case, pushing the ratio above 125 for the first time on record. Second, the monetary gap: central banks abandoned silver as a reserve asset generations ago, so the structural official-sector bid behind gold has no counterpart in silver. Third, market depth: the silver market is far smaller than gold's, so the same flow of money moves silver further, letting it overshoot in both directions.

The same framework explains unusually low readings. Industrial booms, solar buildouts, and retail investment waves concentrate buying in silver, which is what compressed the ratio in 1980 and 2011, the two great squeezes of the modern era.

With the ratio at 69.3 right now, the table above shows it is higher than 35 of the 55 annual averages since 1971. Whether that reads as gold being expensive or silver being cheap depends on which of the forces above you expect to fade first; the number itself does not take sides.

What was the lowest and highest gold to silver ratio ever?

The record high arrived on March 18, 2020, when the ratio spiked above 125:1, the highest level in recorded history. Pandemic lockdowns were crushing industrial silver demand at the exact moment safe-haven buying was holding gold up, and silver briefly traded below $12 per ounce.

The modern low came on January 18, 1980, at roughly 17:1, with silver at $49.45 and gold at $835 (days before its $850 peak) at the climax of the Hunt brothers' attempt to corner the silver market. Some references round that episode to 15:1. Before metals floated freely, governments simply fixed the number: the US Coinage Act of 1792 set it at 15:1, and through most of pre-modern history it moved between roughly 10:1 and 16:1, loosely tracking how much of each metal miners pulled from the ground.

Annual averages smooth out those intraday spikes. On a full-year basis the extremes since 1971 are 26.5 in 1971 and 89.6 in 1991, as the table above shows. The distance between the intraday records and the annual records is itself a lesson: the wildest readings rarely survive more than a few weeks.